Reclaiming FULL Flash Drive Size - HOW??

Forum: USB booting
Topic: Reclaiming FULL Flash Drive Size - HOW??
started by: mdk1000

Posted by mdk1000 on Aug. 27 2006,18:14

The other day I nstalled DLS onto a bootable SanDisk Cruzer Micro 512mb USB flash drive to 'test drive' it's portability. The install went flawlessly and it also boots and runs perfectly on the two machines I've booted it on.

This is my problem:

I now want to remove it from said flash drive (reformat in WinXP -OR- Linux) but it only shows up as a 50mb drive now. Not the 512mb drive I started with.

I'm still somewhat of a Linux newbie and perhaps don't know how to proceed or perhaps the flash drive is now toast? Can't seem to get anywhere with it in WinXP (or maybe I'm not as hip in my WinXPness either).

Spent some time searching the forums and didn't come across any similar posts or solutions (or perhaps I just didn't dig deep enough).

How can I 'wipe' this drive and reclaim it's full 512mb of space? Or can't I?

Thanks.

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Aug. 27 2006,18:36

The first partition is 50mb, the 2nd would be the rest of the drive (of the 512 in your case).
Your disk only appears to be 50mb under windows because that is a limitation of that o/s.

If you want to have 1 partition that is 512mb, use any disk partitioner and delete all the partitions, and then create 1 to fill up the whole drive. (i.e. try fdisk/cfdisk/parted )

Posted by kenboyles72 on Aug. 29 2006,01:33

You're gonna have to repartition the pendrive. What's happening is, the pendrive has two partitions, one that's fat32 and the other that's linux. Since the linux partition cant be seen by dos, its only formating the fat32 partition. So, you're gonna have to run fdisk, delete both partitions, create just one partition, then reformat.